drink deep

Rallying supporters to a political cause, rallying supporters of a team, rallying the adherents of a faith, and rallying oneself to make a romantic commitment all take this form: pretending that we know something (usually about the future [i.e., "We will beat Cal"], but often about the past [i.e., "Christ died for our sins"] or the present [i.e., "The American people want change"]) that we do not and cannot empirically know. In the romantic sphere, as in political sphere, the distinction between lying and failing applies: a divorce due to marital issues does not mean that the parties lied when they said “Till death do us part”; it means that they decided, gradually or suddenly, that fidelity to the truth of their everlasting love has proved unfounded.

The Plasma Spring

Nine years after the fact, says Jesse David Fox, we can see that Zach Braff's Garden State "was good enough to define the things that we come to hate in certain movies (and certain characters and people)"—and that, at least for the most part, we've retroactively "confused its influence for cliché."

Esquire's Stephen Marche, in an astounding piece of bullshit that manages to be both self-indulgently myopic and profoundly unselfconscious, "argues" (J.K. Rowling is richer than the queen! Famous authors are famous!) that today's whiny writers of literature and literary nonfiction are enjoying a "golden age."

Joshua Rothman laments the demise of Google Reader, which "felt like filling up a bookcase. It was a place for organizing your knowledge, and also for stating, and reviewing, your intentions and commitments. It kept a record of the things you meant to read but never did; of the writers you loved but don’t anymore."

Charles Petersen runs through the philosophy of Stanley Cavell, an essential thinker whose project, at least from one angle, is to channel our essential subjectivity into a positive and generous approach to the world.

W.H. Auden reluctantly extols Sigmund Freud, whose dangerous method understands that "psychological events are not natural events but historical" and "stands for treating everyone as a unique and morally responsible person, not as a keyboard."

"We walk around with a well-worn romantic idea of sex as a kind of overwhelming, animalistic force that possesses us and leads us to action, whether we like it or not. But of course sexual desire can also, in the crucial moment, fail to overwhelm us, and in our world this is really the more urgent, anxiety-provoking, and lonely situation." Elaine Blair reviews Lena Dunham's Girls.